The Polite Generation

In the late '50s, a rising nightclub comedian was wise to be sick if he wanted to be solvent. Monied mirth was found in plane crashes, terminal diseases, physical handicaps, capital punishment. Then Bob Newhart cleared the atmosphere. His monologues, softly twanged and delivered at leisure, drew laughter that wasn't full of marsh gas.

Newhart has more or less fathered a new generation of more or less polite comedians--not all the new faces in the field, but many of them. Charlie Manna, for one, is a typical new comedian on the nightclub circuit whose material never offends either the intelligence or the sensibilities of his audiences. He is a Bronx-accented New Yorker now working in the Catskills. His relaxed monologues are zany but sub-psychotic, riddled with implausibilities but not with disease.

Ships & Caesars. Manna is adept at verbal slapstick. He is the fellow who created in the night boites of Cocoa Beach the astronaut who refused to be blasted off until his missing crayons were found. In another routine, he lands the first men on the moon--with such a jolt that their trousers fall down. He has some good one-liners. "I don't talk about Liz Taylor because some day it will be my turn," he says. He also notes that he never talks about his wife because "what's done is done."

His best things, however, are his solo playlets. In one routine, he gets inside the human body and runs it like a ship: "Now hear this. Now hear this. All glands--secrete, secrete." Once an aspiring opera singer, Manna scores another sequence with his noteworthy tenor as he graduates the barber of Seville from barber school with a Phi Beta and has him refuse to part a man's hair from ear to ear lest people whisper into the fellow's nose. And in an inspired version of the death of Caesar, he has Caesar standing in the Forum hearing senatorial complaints. One comes from Cassius, who thinks there should be a month named after him. That would be ludicrous, retorts Caesar, whetting Cassius' blade. "Thirty days hath September, April, Cassius, and November." Hah, hah. Googgh.

Kool-Aid & Custer. Jackie Vernon, now working in New York, is so polite, humble and self-effacing that he risks tears instead of laughter. Raised in East Harlem and educated at The Bronx's Theodore Roosevelt High School, he has a mild voice with a sad urban accent, and his heavy-jowled blinking face has a kind of massive resemblance to Jonathan Winters. If it is true that all comedians and clowns are deeply and utterly defeated, then Jackie Vernon manages to suggest that he is the archetype of his tribe.

"To look at me, you'd never guess I used to be a dull guy," he says. "My idea of a wild time was Kool-Aid and oatmeal cookies. At parties, I stayed in the room with the coats." Dipping toward the sick, he tells about a friend, the author of What to Do in Case of Peace, who prophesied that on May 1, 1951, the world would come to an end. "For him it did," Vernon remembers. "He was eating in the Automat and the little glass door snapped down and broke his neck. That night in the hospital, he passed a crisis and died."

Bang or Bust. Bill Cosby is a shy and studious young Negro comedian who went to Temple University, where he was a good student, a football halfback, and a multipurpose track athlete. He got his early experience in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, where he used to tell race jokes, but now that he is booked into the big time (Chicago's Mister Kelly's, San Francisco's hungry i, Manhattan's Village Gate), he has decided to bang or bust as a general comedian rather than as a colorful colored man. He has worked out a funny routine on karate, and he seems to have all the drive and flair he needs, but his taste is still a bit green. He tells about the mating of a steel Superman with a cast iron Superwoman, and he makes noises that suggest a 20-ton, front-end loader scooping up a Caterpillar tractor and heading off into the bush. "You know how they had to deliver the baby?" he asks. "With a blowtorch."

Jackie Mason is a 32-year-old rabbi who has given up the temple and now tells jokes with a message. Too often the message scrapes through, but the humor does not. He is a dedicated slayer of cliche philosophies. "Don't change horses in midstream," he scoffs. "Did you ever take two horses into the middle of a stream? That is stupid in itself. But I tried it, and you know, the second one was better." Somebody digs. Mason gets top bookings.

The oldest new comedian around is Jackie Kahane, who is 39 and has actually been a figure in the nightclub woodwork for some time but is now crawling toward recognition. He is a Canadian and a throwback to the era of the stand-up comedian, the school that thought a comic was a gagman, not an actor, and any joke that couldn't be told in one breath couldn't be funny. Kahane sprays his BBs in all directions. "In kindergarten, my kid flunked clay ... I love children, I went to school with them . . . Our dog is adopted. My wife and I couldn't have one . . My brother-in-law? Something's wrong when a guy tries to take his pants off over his head and makes it."

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